eLearning has a satisfactory set of options if your goal is information delivery or procedural training, but what about creating meaningful eLearning for complex skill development or for the not-so-procedural kinds of problems that show up more and more in the workplace? What about creating learning for those situations where your SME can't tell you what good performance looks like except to say, "Well, you know it when you see it.”

We are exposed to polished and professional content that we only wish we could recreate in a small- to medium-sized company. Hiring outside vendors to create videos, situational learning, and multimedia presentations is beyond the budget for many of us, and yet we recognize and understand the benefits of increasing employee and customer engagement through the leveraging of technology to supplement our online learning. If only we could find a way to do it ourselves…

Scenarios are wonderful tools for encouraging changes in performance. Once we see ourselves in a story and are invited to take on a challenge familiar to us, we become more open to evaluating our own behavior. But bringing a scenario to life takes more than simply describing a situation and slapping a name on the protagonist. Transforming seemingly mundane tasks into powerful stories is something with which even the most prolific and celebrated writers struggle. Writing scenarios for elearning is challenging because it requires communication and storytelling abilities that instructional design programs and certification programs do not teach. IDs are left to their own devices when creating immersive stories for learners that keep them engaged, and simultaneously addresses the performance we want to change.

If they're going to work in a virtual classroom, your traditional learning methodologies need a makeover. A virtual session is more than lecture and uploaded PowerPoints. Unique techniques must be used to engage learners throughout the session. A common pitfall is to focus on the technology and forget about the design—often resulting in unengaging sessions focused on using the tools and not meeting the needs of the learners.

The two goals of any training program are to teach employees new information and then to enable them to transfer their new knowledge into their workplace. But learning transfer is a complex process, and most trainers do not understand the simple steps that they can take to ensure that knowledge transfers from the computer where it is learned to the workplace where it is needed.

Imagine you're about to build a house with all the bells and whistles. Now imagine building this house without a set of blueprints. Would your contractors know what to build, and where? Would the city be able to approve any additions or modifications you want to make? Like the blueprint for a house, your eLearning storyboard outlines everything about the training you're creating. This same concept applies to eLearning and training as a whole. It's important to create a storyboard that can be easily understood by everyone in the project process, so all are "in the know" on what the final product will look like.

Too often our industry rushes to develop a course, or whatever the default method is within their workflow. We need to break the habit and provide the paths to create better tools and access to learning for audiences.

Microlearning. Personalized learning. Learning styles. These are all buzzwords you've heard from vendors, at conferences, and on social media. The pace of technology development and implementation is increasing exponentially, and so is the number of buzzwords. Even if you try to keep abreast of the latest L&D trends, it's impossible to be an expert in everything. How do you know what to try right now, what to keep an eye on for the future, or what's industry hogwash?

If you were tasked with finding solutions to a curriculum problem, what might you do? Microlearning? Mobile learning? Gamification? Virtual reality/augmented reality? More instructor-led training? We're often tempted to turn to new technology or trends, thinking one of these must be what our approach is missing. Certainly these modes are useful, but how do we know if they're the right solutions until we know what the problems are? In this session you will learn to face the problems as our learners would, using empathy, and build the Design Thinking process from there. Only then can you create meaningful solutions that use the right mix of tools and technology to elevate your training.

One of the top challenges for learning professionals is getting managers to support learning. Effective talent development can positively impact employee engagement, innovation, and long-term growth. How can we make leaders own their role in employee learning? How are managers motivated to invest their time in developing their people, which often doesn't bring a return in the short run?

Adult learning principles state that adults learn best when content is relevant. So why do most virtual classroom lessons rely on lectures and slides? One of the most effective ways to ensure learning sticks is by getting learners involved, and scenario-based learning design does just that. We only have so much time to dedicate to formal learning, every moment needs to be impactful and relevant. Unfortunately, virtual classroom sessions tend to focus on getting as much content out there as possible, and leaving it up to the learners to figure out how to make it all work.  

There’s been a large amount of research in recent years exploring the value music has on the brain and learning. We’ve all experienced it in some way in our lives; from listening to music while learning or studying, learning something from a catchy song, or by learning to play an instrument.  In this session you will explore the many relationships between music and learning. You will examine and discuss how people learn to play an instrument—there will even be ukuleles available for some to participate hands-on—and what this might mean to learning in general. Using the introductory ukulele lesson as a framework, this fun session will help you explore the many ways that music impacts and enhances learning. (Ukuleles made available during this session will be donated to the Children’s Hospital of Nevada UMC after the conference.)

Have you ever been handed a PowerPoint deck and told to go off and build a course? Many organizations tend to begin an eLearning design project leading with their content needs; desired outcomes are merely an afterthought, if they're a thought at all. Unfortunately, whether or not a solution is successful is often left to chance. With so much on the line, who wants to take that gamble? So how can you approach the design process with a more results-focused point of view?

Maybe it's the eyerolls. Maybe it is the rapid clicks of the "next" button. Regardless of what the action is, we know the look and feeling of learner disengagement. If we know that we don't want our end users to feel this way, then why is it a common occurrence in so many organizations? Instead of only focusing on research and high-level theories, this session will explore solutions to this common problem in a unique way—an interactive mystery!

Knowing your audience is a fundamental step in the analysis of designing training. When that audience is international, this is even more critical for understanding cultural differences in both language and visuals. Then add in the additional factor of using the comic medium as a vehicle to tell a story through instruction. This combination is what was faced when designing an instructional comic for labor and delivery nursing students in northern India. This project needed to not just deliver content, but also do it in a way that reflected this audience’s lived experience and also leveraged the unique strengths of the comic medium.

A struggle many of us face in our work is a lack of retention of concepts and content. Studies show learning experiences that aren’t entertaining, current, or relatable to the audience can have less success with short-term and long-term learning retention and comprehension. The solution: transforming your pedagogy to include pop culture references. This approach gives people a personal relationship with the material being taught, which can lead to increased comprehension and retention.

Copyright law can be intimidating, even though its intent is to encourage creativity. The cost of copyright confusion can affect every stage of the development and delivery process, as well. But thankfully it can be easier to understand how to respect copyright and find free online media you can legally use than it might seem at the surface.

As technology has continued to advance, engineering methods are increasingly needed for learning and development initiatives that depend upon data science, computer science, and learning science to structure solutions and to measure outcomes and results. Learning engineering represents a new amalgamated discipline that applies engineering methodologies to develop learning technologies and infrastructures to better support learners and learning. The need for learning engineering is becoming more apparent, and the powerful combination of this field with the work of instructional design has the potential to significantly advance learning and its impact on organizations. For this partnership to work well, we need to understand what competencies instructional designers need to have in this new world, as well as the competencies that learning engineers bring to the table .

The traditional approach for designing a learning experience and then gathering content can sometimes also inadvertently include frustrating roadblocks—things like SME wrangling, latecomer reviewers who disrupt design and delivery timelines, and new content that hits the stage at the eleventh hour. With more learning for us to create and quicker turnarounds expected, anything that can help us speed up our design cycles and reduce these kinds of disruptions can be a real win.

Do you really need a virtual classroom producer? Maybe you don't. But what you absolutely need is the skill set. Whether you assign them to a dedicated producer or do them yourself, commanding the technical aspects of your virtual classroom delivery is the key to online learner engagement. Still not sure? Recall the last webinar you attended, the one that started late due to audio problems? Remember the recent breakout activity you tried to complete, but everyone was too technically confused to get to the assignment? Or how about that time everything was cancelled because the slides wouldn't load, and no one could figure out what to do? Virtual classroom production is an art. It requires a unique skill set that balances deep platform knowledge with multitasking agility, while at the same time calming everyone down before the panicked screams can be heard through the mute. 

Everyone has had a manager come to them with a request that just treats a symptom of the real performance issue instead of the actual cause. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to convince managers and stakeholders to spend time and energy analyzing the problem that they're trying to address. When time is limited (and whose time isn't limited?) you need to maximize your conversations and get the whole story. You also need to update your root cause analysis toolkit with new frameworks to help you better identify and solve problems. And the answer for both is design thinking.

Is the success of popular and engaging games like Fortnite an accident? Not at all. These game developers have figured out strategies for how they can effectively capture someone’s attention and retain it over time. Imagine what you could accomplish if you knew some of the secret methods Fortnite uses and could apply them in your own work?

DemoFest is a huge science fair-like event; a collective showcase of eLearning examples from conference participants. As you move from table to table, exploring a wide range of learning solutions, you can discuss the tools, tech, and processes with those who built them. Although it’s an exciting evening of discovery, diving deep into each of the projects can be challenging.

In their training, people at an oil and gas company could perfectly define and identify first aid key concepts and successfully complete knowledge checks, such as deciding which technique would prove more useful in certain situations. However, when an accident took place in the real world, they didn't know what to do, how to act, or how to put into practice the theory they’d learned. The company needed a solution that would help their employees deal with these daily situations and teach them how to make life-and-death decisions, while still providing them with a safe place to hone their skills. The solution? Using branching scenarios to create risk-free environments for people to practice what they’d learned and see the consequences of their actions.

eLearning is typically built with a computer-first approach in mind. Designers imagine their learners to be sitting at a PC or laptop, and leave it to the responsive design functions of rapid content authoring tools to do the hard work of making the learning mobile ready. The downside of this approach means this eLearning isn’t optimized fully for mobile usability, which is a challenge because usability and accessibility for eLearning goes beyond adjusting to a smaller screen. Designers need to know how to build with mobile-first in mind to ensure the experiences they create can be used effectively and efficiently, and to avoid frustrating mobile learners.

You've received a request for training support on a new initiative. It's high-profile, mission-critical, and must be launched on time. But the tool/process won't be ready until the same day your training needs to go live. There's no option for pushing back the launch. What do you do?  Well, you can panic, get angry, or get to work. Enter the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—normally used for software development and other Agile development processes—but an approach that can also be useful for learning.